Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Newsletter published on 29 June 2017Seymour M. Hersh is a credible source. He exposed the My Lai
Massacre, but is now being dismissed as a crank. The media blackout attests
to collusion between the Media and the Military, and is proof of a
high-level Conspiracy operating in much of the Western world. - Peter
M.

Exclusive:
The mainstream media is so hostile to challenges to its groupthinks that
famed journalist Seymour Hersh had to take his take-down of President
Trump’s April 6 attack on Syria to Germany, says ex-CIA analyst Ray
McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

Legendary investigative reporter Seymour
Hersh is challenging the Trump administration’s version of events
surrounding the April 4 "chemical weapons attack" on the northern Syrian
town of Khan Sheikhoun – though Hersh had to find a publisher in Germany to
get his information out.

In the Sunday edition of Die Welt, Hersh reports that his national
security sources offered a distinctly different account, revealing
President Trump rashly deciding to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a
Syrian airbase on April 6 despite the absence of intelligence supporting
his conclusion that the Syrian military was guilty.

Hersh draws on
the kind of inside sources from whom he has earned longstanding trust to
dispute that there ever was a "chemical weapons attack" and to assert that
Trump was told that no evidence existed against the Syrian government but
ordered "his generals" to "retaliate" anyway.

Marine General Joseph
Dunford, Chairman of the, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Marine General,
now Defense Secretary James "Mad-Dog" Mattis ordered the attacks apparently
knowing that the reason given was what one of Hersh’s sources called a
"fairy tale."

They then left it to Trump’s national security adviser Army
General H. R. McMaster to further the deceit with the help of a compliant
mainstream media, which broke from its current tradition of distrusting
whatever Trump says in favor of its older tradition of favoring "regime
change" in Syria and trusting pretty much whatever the "rebels"
claim.

According to Hersh’s sources, the normal "deconfliction" process
was followed before the April 4 strike. In such procedures, U.S. and Russian
officers supply one another with advance details of airstrikes, such as
target coordinates, to avoid accidental confrontations among the
warplanes crisscrossing Syria.

Russia and Syrian Air Force officers
gave details of the flight path to and from Khan Sheikhoun in English, Hersh
reported. The target was a two-story cinderblock building in which senior
leaders – "high-value targets" – of the two jihadist groups controlling the
town were about to hold a meeting. Because of the perceived importance of
the mission, the Russians took the unusual step of giving the Syrian air
force a GPS-guided bomb to do the job, but the explosives were conventional,
not chemical, Hersh reported.

The meeting place was on the floor
above the basement of the building, where a source whom Hersh described as
"a senior adviser to the U.S. intelligence community," told Hersh: "The
basement was used as storage for rockets, weapons, and ammunition … and also
chlorine-based decontaminates for cleansing the bodies of the dead before
burial."

A Bomb Damage Assessment

Hersh describes what happened
when the building was struck on the morning of April 4: "A Bomb Damage
Assessment by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of
the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that
could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town,
formed by the release of fertilizers, disinfectants, and other goods stored
in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which
trapped the fumes close to the ground.

"According to intelligence
estimates, the strike itself killed up to four jihadist leaders and an
unknown number of drivers and security aides. There is no confirmed count of
the number of civilians killed by the poisonous gases that were released by
the secondary explosions, although opposition activists reported that there
were more than 80 dead, and outlets such as CNN have put the figure as high
as 92."

Due to the fog of war, which is made denser by the fact that
jihadists associated with Al Qaeda control the area, many of the details of
the incident were unclear on that day and remain so still. No independent
on-the-ground investigation has taken place.

But there were other
reasons to doubt Syrian guilt, including the implausibility of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad choosing that time – while his forces were making
dramatic strides in finally defeating the jihadists and immediately after
the Trump administration had indicated it had reversed President Obama’s
"regime change" policy in Syria – to launch a sarin attack, which was sure
to outrage the world and likely draw U.S. retaliation.

However, logic
was brushed aside after local "activists," including some closely tied to
the jihadists, quickly uploaded all manner of images onto social media,
showing dead and dying children and other victims said to be suffering from
sarin nerve gas. Inconsistencies were brushed aside – such as the
"eyewitness" who insisted, "We could smell it from 500 meters away" when
sarin is odorless.

Potent Images

Still, whether credible or not,
these social-media images had a potent propaganda effect. Hersh writes that
within hours of watching the gruesome photos on TV – and before he had
received any U.S. intelligence corroboration – Trump told his national
security aides to plan retaliation against Syria. According to Hersh, it was
an evidence-free decision, except for what Trump had seen on the TV
shows.

The photograph released by the White House of President Trump
meeting with his advisers at his estate in Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017,
regarding his decision to launch missile strikes against Syria.

Hersh
quotes one U.S. officer who, upon learning of the White House decision to
"retaliate" against Syria, remarked: "We KNOW that there was no chemical
attack … the Russians are furious – claiming we have the real intel and know
the truth…"

A similar event had occurred on Aug. 21, 2013, outside
Damascus – and although the available evidence now points to a "false-flag"
provocation pulled off by the jihadists to trick the West into mounting a
full-fledged assault on Assad’s military, Western media still blames
that incident on Assad, too.

In the Aug. 21, 2013 case, social media
also proved crucial in creating and pushing the Assad-did-it narrative. On
Aug. 30, 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry pinned the responsibility
on Assad no fewer than 35 times, even though earlier that week National
Intelligence Director James Clapper had warned President Obama privately
that Assad’s culpability was "not a slam dunk."

Kerry was fond of
describing social media as an "extraordinarily useful tool," and it sure did
come in handy in supporting Kerry’s repeated but unproven charges against
Assad, especially since the U.S. government had invested heavily in training
and equipping Syrian "activists" to dramatize their cause. (The mainstream
media also has ignored evidence that the jihadists staged at least one
chlorine gas attack. And, as you may recall, President George W. Bush also
spoke glowingly about the value of "catapulting the
propaganda.")

Implications for U.S.-Russia

To the extent Hersh’s
account finds its way into Western corporate media, most likely it will be
dismissed out of hand simply because it dovetails with Moscow’s version of
what happened and thus is, ipso facto, "wrong."

Russian President
Vladimir Putin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 10, 2015, at the
Kremlin. (Photo from Russian government)

But the Russians (and the
Syrians) know what did happen – and if there really was no sarin bombing –
they recognize Trump’s reckless resort to Tomahawks and the subsequent
attempts to cover up for the President. All this will have
repercussions.

This is as tense a time in U.S-Russian relations as I can
remember from my five decades of experience watching Russian defense and
foreign policy. It is left to the Russians to figure out which is worse: a
President controlled by "his generals" or one who is so out of control
that "his generals" are the ones who must restrain him.

With Russia
reiterating its threat to target any unannounced aircraft flying in Syrian
airspace west of the Euphrates, Russian President Putin could authorize his
own generals to shoot first and ask questions later. Then, hold onto your
hat.

As of this writing, there is no sign in "mainstream media" of any
reporting on Hersh’s groundbreaking piece. It is a commentary on the
conformist nature of today’s Western media that an alternative analysis
challenging the conventional wisdom – even when produced by a prominent
journalist like Sy Hersh – faces such trouble finding a place to
publish.

The mainstream hatred of Assad and Putin has reached such
extraordinary levels that pretty much anything can be said or written about
them with few if any politicians or journalists daring to express doubts
regardless of how shaky the evidence is.

Even the London Review of
Books, which published Hersh’s earlier debunking of the Aug. 21, 2013
sarin-gas incident, wouldn’t go off onto the limb this time despite having
paid for his investigation.

According to Hersh, the LRB did not want to
be "vulnerable to criticism for seeming to take the view of the Syrian and
Russia governments when it came to the April 4 bombing in Khan Sheikhoun."
So much for diversity of thought in today’s West.

Yet, what was
interesting about the Khan Sheikhoun case is that was a test of whom the
mainstream media detested more. The MSM has taken the position that pretty
much whatever Trump says is untrue or at least deserving of intense
fact-checking. But the MSM also believes whatever attacks on Assad that the
Syrian "activists" post on social media are true and disbelieves whatever
Putin says. So, this was a tug-of-war on which prejudices were stronger –
and it turned out that the antipathy toward Syria and Russia is more
powerful than the distrust of Trump.

Ignoring Critics

The MSM
bought into Trump’s narrative to such a degree that any criticism, no matter
how credentialed the critic, gets either ignored or
ridiculed.

Photograph of men in Khan Sheikdoun in Syria, allegedly
inside a crater where a sarin-gas bomb landed.

For instance, the
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity produced a memo on April 11
questioning Trump’s rush to judgment. Former MIT professor Ted Postol, a
specialist in applying science to national security incidents, also poked
major holes in the narrative of a government sarin attack. But the MSM
silence was deafening.

In remarks to Die Welt, Seymour Hersh, who first
became famous for exposing the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam War
and disclosed the Abu Ghraib abuse story during the Iraq War, explained that
he still gets upset at government lying and at the reluctance of the media
to hold governments accountable:

"We have a President in America
today who lies repeatedly … but he must learn that he cannot lie about
intelligence relied upon before authorizing an act of war. There are those
in the Trump administration who understand this, which is why I learned the
information I did. If this story creates even a few moments of regret in the
White House, it will have served a very high purpose."

But it may be
that the Germans reading Welt am Sonntag may be among the few who will get
the benefit of Hersh’s contrarian view of the April 4 incident in Khan
Sheikhoun. Perhaps they will begin to wonder why Chancellor Angela Merkel
continues with her "me-too" approach to whatever Washington wants to do
regarding tensions with Russia and warfare in Syria.

Will Merkel
admit that she was likely deceived in parroting Washington’s line making the
Syrian government responsible for a "massacre with chemical weapons" on
April 4? Mercifully, most Americans will be spared having to choose between
believing President Trump and Seymour Hersh.

Ray McGovern works with the
publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington. During his 27 years as a CIA analyst, he was Chief of the
Soviet Foreign Policy Branch; he also prepared the President’s Daily Brief,
and conducted the early morning briefings of President Reagan’s top national
security advisers.

On April 6, United
States President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile
strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said
was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two
days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the
order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it
had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical
weapon.

The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had
targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided
bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including
information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by
the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials
in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and
Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military
and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president's
determination to ignore the evidence. "None of this makes any sense," one
officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. "We KNOW that
there was no chemical attack ... the Russians are furious. Claiming we have
the real intel and know the truth ... I guess it didn't matter whether we
elected Clinton or Trump."

Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the
world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun.
Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of
nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists,
including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close
association with the Syrian opposition.

The provenance of the photos
was not clear and no international observers have yet inspected the site,
but the immediate popular assumption worldwide was that this was a
deliberate use of the nerve agent sarin, authorized by President Bashar
Assad of Syria. Trump endorsed that assumption by issuing a statement within
hours of the attack, describing Assad’s "heinous actions" as being a
consequence of the Obama administration’s "weakness and irresolution" in
addressing what he said was Syria’s past use of chemical weapons.

To
the dismay of many senior members of his national security team, Trump could
not be swayed over the next 48 hours of intense briefings and
decision-making. In a series of interviews, I learned of the total
disconnect between the president and many of his military advisers and
intelligence officials, as well as officers on the ground in the region
who had an entirely different understanding of the nature of Syria’s
attack on Khan Sheikhoun. I was provided with evidence of that
disconnect, in the form of transcripts of real-time communications,
immediately following the Syrian attack on April 4. In an important
pre-strike process known as deconfliction, U.S. and Russian officers
routinely supply one another with advance details of planned flight
paths and target coordinates, to ensure that there is no risk of
collision or accidental encounter (the Russians speak on behalf of the
Syrian military). This information is supplied daily to the American
AWACS surveillance planes that monitor the flights once airborne.
Deconfliction’s success and importance can be measured by the fact that
there has yet to be one collision, or even a near miss, among the
high-powered supersonic American, Allied, Russian and Syrian fighter
bombers.

Russian and Syrian Air Force officers gave details of the
carefully planned flight path to and from Khan Shiekhoun on April 4
directly, in English, to the deconfliction monitors aboard the AWACS plane,
which was on patrol near the Turkish border, 60 miles or more to the
north.

The Syrian target at Khan Sheikhoun, as shared with the Americans
at Doha, was depicted as a two-story cinder-block building in the northern
part of town. Russian intelligence, which is shared when necessary with
Syria and the U.S. as part of their joint fight against jihadist groups,
had established that a high-level meeting of jihadist leaders was to
take place in the building, including representatives of Ahrar al-Sham
and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. The
two groups had recently joined forces, and controlled the town and
surrounding area. Russian intelligence depicted the cinder-block
building as a command and control center that housed a grocery and other
commercial premises on its ground floor with other essential shops
nearby, including a fabric shop and an electronics store.

"The rebels
control the population by controlling the distribution of goods that people
need to live – food, water, cooking oil, propane gas, fertilizers for
growing their crops, and insecticides to protect the crops," a senior
adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior
positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, told
me. The basement was used as storage for rockets, weapons and ammunition, as
well as products that could be distributed for free to the community, among
them medicines and chlorine-based decontaminants for cleansing the bodies of
the dead before burial. The meeting place – a regional headquarters – was on
the floor above. "It was an established meeting place," the senior adviser
said. "A long-time facility that would have had security, weapons,
communications, files and a map center." The Russians were intent on
confirming their intelligence and deployed a drone for days above the
site to monitor communications and develop what is known in the
intelligence community as a POL – a pattern of life. The goal was to
take note of those going in and out of the building, and to track
weapons being moved back and forth, including rockets and
ammunition.

One reason for the Russian message to Washington about the
intended target was to ensure that any CIA asset or informant who had
managed to work his way into the jihadist leadership was forewarned not to
attend the meeting. I was told that the Russians passed the warning directly
to the CIA. "They were playing the game right," the senior adviser said.
The Russian guidance noted that the jihadist meeting was coming at a
time of acute pressure for the insurgents: Presumably Jabhat al-Nusra
and Ahrar al-Sham were desperately seeking a path forward in the new
political climate. In the last few days of March, Trump and two of his
key national security aides – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN
Ambassador Nikki Haley – had made statements acknowledging that, as the
New York Times put it, the White House "has abandoned the goal" of
pressuring Assad "to leave power, marking a sharp departure from the
Middle East policy that guided the Obama administration for more than
five years." White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told a press
briefing on March 31 that "there is a political reality that we have to
accept," implying that Assad was there to stay.

Russian and Syrian
intelligence officials, who coordinate operations closely with the American
command posts, made it clear that the planned strike on Khan Sheikhoun was
special because of the high-value target. "It was a red-hot change. The
mission was out of the ordinary – scrub the sked," the senior adviser told
me. "Every operations officer in the region" – in the Army, Marine Corps,
Air Force, CIA and NSA – "had to know there was something going on. The
Russians gave the Syrian Air Force a guided bomb and that was a rarity.
They’re skimpy with their guided bombs and rarely share them with the Syrian
Air Force. And the Syrians assigned their best pilot to the mission, with
the best wingman." The advance intelligence on the target, as supplied by
the Russians, was given the highest possible score inside the American
community.

The Execute Order governing U.S. military operations in
theater, which was issued by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
provide instructions that demarcate the relationship between the American
and Russian forces operating in Syria. "It’s like an ops order – ‘Here’s
what you are authorized to do,’" the adviser said. "We do not share
operational control with the Russians. We don’t do combined operations
with them, or activities directly in support of one of their operations.
But coordination is permitted. We keep each other apprised of what’s
happening and within this package is the mutual exchange of
intelligence. If we get a hot tip that could help the Russians do their
mission, that’s coordination; and the Russians do the same for us. When
we get a hot tip about a command and control facility," the adviser
added, referring to the target in Khan Sheikhoun, "we do what we can to
help them act on it." "This was not a chemical weapons strike," the
adviser said. "That’s a fairy tale. If so, everyone involved in
transferring, loading and arming the weapon – you’ve got to make it
appear like a regular 500-pound conventional bomb – would be wearing
Hazmat protective clothing in case of a leak. There would be very little
chance of survival without such gear. Military grade sarin includes
additives designed to increase toxicity and lethality. Every batch that
comes out is maximized for death. That is why it is made. It is odorless
and invisible and death can come within a minute. No cloud. Why produce
a weapon that people can run away from?"

The target was struck at
6:55 a.m. on April 4, just before midnight in Washington. A Bomb Damage
Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and
force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary
explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread
over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and
other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense
morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground. According to
intelligence estimates, the senior adviser said, the strike itself killed up
to four jihadist leaders, and an unknown number of drivers and security
aides. There is no confirmed count of the number of civilians killed by the
poisonous gases that were released by the secondary explosions, although
opposition activists reported that there were more than 80 dead, and
outlets such as CNN have put the figure as high as 92. A team from
Médecins Sans Frontières, treating victims from Khan Sheikhoun at a
clinic 60 miles to the north, reported that "eight patients showed
symptoms – including constricted pupils, muscle spasms and involuntary
defecation – which are consistent with exposure to a neurotoxic agent
such as sarin gas or similar compounds." MSF also visited other
hospitals that had received victims and found that patients there
"smelled of bleach, suggesting that they had been exposed to chlorine."
In other words, evidence suggested that there was more than one chemical
responsible for the symptoms observed, which would not have been the
case if the Syrian Air Force – as opposition activists insisted – had
dropped a sarin bomb, which has no percussive or ignition power to
trigger secondary explosions. The range of symptoms is, however,
consistent with the release of a mixture of chemicals, including
chlorine and the organophosphates used in many fertilizers, which can
cause neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin.

The internet
swung into action within hours, and gruesome photographs of the victims
flooded television networks and YouTube. U.S. intelligence was tasked with
establishing what had happened. Among the pieces of information received was
an intercept of Syrian communications collected before the attack by an
allied nation. The intercept, which had a particularly strong effect on some
of Trump’s aides, did not mention nerve gas or sarin, but it did quote a
Syrian general discussing a "special" weapon and the need for a highly
skilled pilot to man the attack plane. The reference, as those in the
American intelligence community understood, and many of the inexperienced
aides and family members close to Trump may not have, was to a
Russian-supplied bomb with its built-in guidance system. "If you’ve already
decided it was a gas attack, you will then inevitably read the talk about a
special weapon as involving a sarin bomb," the adviser said. "Did the
Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts
to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president
did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb
the shit out of Syria."

At the UN the next day, Ambassador Haley
created a media sensation when she displayed photographs of the dead and
accused Russia of being complicit. "How many more children have to die
before Russia cares?" she asked. NBC News, in a typical report that day,
quoted American officials as confirming that nerve gas had been used and
Haley tied the attack directly to Syrian President Assad. "We know that
yesterday’s attack was a new low even for the barbaric Assad regime," she
said. There was irony in America's rush to blame Syria and criticize Russia
for its support of Syria's denial of any use of gas in Khan Sheikhoun, as
Ambassador Haley and others in Washington did. "What doesn't occur to most
Americans" the adviser said, "is if there had been a Syrian nerve gas attack
authorized by Bashar, the Russians would be 10 times as upset as anyone in
the West. Russia’s strategy against ISIS, which involves getting American
cooperation, would have been destroyed and Bashar would be responsible
for pissing off Russia, with unknown consequences for him. Bashar would
do that? When he’s on the verge of winning the war? Are you kidding
me?"

Trump, a constant watcher of television news, said, while King
Abdullah of Jordan was sitting next to him in the Oval Office, that what had
happened was "horrible, horrible" and a "terrible affront to humanity."
Asked if his administration would change its policy toward the Assad
government, he said: "You will see." He gave a hint of the response to
come at the subsequent news conference with King Abdullah: "When you
kill innocent children, innocent babies – babies, little babies – with a
chemical gas that is so lethal ... that crosses many, many lines,
beyond a red line . ... That attack on children yesterday had a big
impact on me. Big impact ... It’s very, very possible ... that my
attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much."

Within hours
of viewing the photos, the adviser said, Trump instructed the national
defense apparatus to plan for retaliation against Syria. "He did this before
he talked to anybody about it. The planners then asked the CIA and DIA if
there was any evidence that Syria had sarin stored at a nearby airport or
somewhere in the area. Their military had to have it somewhere in the area
in order to bomb with it." "The answer was, ‘We have no evidence that Syria
had sarin or used it,’" the adviser said. "The CIA also told them that there
was no residual delivery for sarin at Sheyrat [the airfield from which the
Syrian SU-24 bombers had taken off on April 4] and Assad had no motive to
commit political suicide." Everyone involved, except perhaps the president,
also understood that a highly skilled United Nations team had spent more
than a year in the aftermath of an alleged sarin attack in 2013 by Syria,
removing what was said to be all chemical weapons from a dozen Syrian
chemical weapons depots.

At this point, the adviser said, the
president’s national security planners were more than a little rattled: "No
one knew the provenance of the photographs. We didn’t know who the children
were or how they got hurt. Sarin actually is very easy to detect because it
penetrates paint, and all one would have to do is get a paint sample. We
knew there was a cloud and we knew it hurt people. But you cannot jump from
there to certainty that Assad had hidden sarin from the UN because he wanted
to use it in Khan Sheikhoun." The intelligence made clear that a Syrian Air
Force SU-24 fighter bomber had used a conventional weapon to hit its
target: There had been no chemical warhead. And yet it was impossible
for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up
his mind. "The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls
and said it was an Assad atrocity," the senior adviser said. "It’s
typical of human nature. You jump to the conclusion you want.
Intelligence analysts do not argue with a president. They’re not going
to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I
quit.’"

The national security advisers understood their dilemma: Trump
wanted to respond to the affront to humanity committed by Syria and he did
not want to be dissuaded. They were dealing with a man they considered to be
not unkind and not stupid, but his limitations when it came to national
security decisions were severe. "Everyone close to him knows his
proclivity for acting precipitously when he does not know the facts,"
the adviser said. "He doesn’t read anything and has no real historical
knowledge. He wants verbal briefings and photographs. He’s a risk-taker.
He can accept the consequences of a bad decision in the business world;
he will just lose money. But in our world, lives will be lost and there
will be long-term damage to our national security if he guesses wrong.
He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump
says: 'Do it."’

On April 6, Trump convened a meeting of national
security officials at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The meeting was not
to decide what to do, but how best to do it – or, as some wanted, how to do
the least and keep Trump happy. "The boss knew before the meeting that they
didn’t have the intelligence, but that was not the issue," the adviser said.
"The meeting was about, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do,' and then he gets
the options."

The available intelligence was not relevant. The most
experienced man at the table was Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a
retired Marine Corps general who had the president’s respect and understood,
perhaps, how quickly that could evaporate. Mike Pompeo, the CIA director
whose agency had consistently reported that it had no evidence of a Syrian
chemical bomb, was not present. Secretary of State Tillerson was admired on
the inside for his willingness to work long hours and his avid reading of
diplomatic cables and reports, but he knew little about waging war and
the management of a bombing raid. Those present were in a bind, the
adviser said. "The president was emotionally energized by the disaster
and he wanted options." He got four of them, in order of extremity.
Option one was to do nothing. All involved, the adviser said, understood
that was a non-starter. Option two was a slap on the wrist: to bomb an
airfield in Syria, but only after alerting the Russians and, through
them, the Syrians, to avoid too many casualties. A few of the planners
called this the "gorilla option": America would glower and beat its
chest to provoke fear and demonstrate resolve, but cause little
significant damage. The third option was to adopt the strike package
that had been presented to Obama in 2013, and which he ultimately chose
not to pursue. The plan called for the massive bombing of the main
Syrian airfields and command and control centers using B1 and B52
aircraft launched from their bases in the U.S. Option four was
"decapitation": to remove Assad by bombing his palace in Damascus, as
well as his command and control network and all of the underground
bunkers he could possibly retreat to in a crisis.

"Trump ruled out
option one off the bat," the senior adviser said, and the assassination of
Assad was never considered. "But he said, in essence: ‘You’re the military
and I want military action.’" The president was also initially opposed to
the idea of giving the Russians advance warning before the strike, but
reluctantly accepted it. "We gave him the Goldilocks option – not too hot,
not too cold, but just right." The discussion had its bizarre moments.
Tillerson wondered at the Mar-a-Lago meeting why the president could not
simply call in the B52 bombers and pulverize the air base. He was told that
B52s were very vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) in the area and
using such planes would require suppression fire that could kill some
Russian defenders. "What is that?" Tillerson asked. Well, sir, he was told,
that means we would have to destroy the upgraded SAM sites along the B52
flight path, and those are manned by Russians, and we possibly would be
confronted with a much more difficult situation. "The lesson here was:
Thank God for the military men at the meeting," the adviser said. "They
did the best they could when confronted with a decision that had already
been made."

Fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles were fired from two U.S.
Navy destroyers on duty in the Mediterranean, the Ross and the Porter, at
Shayrat Air Base near the government-controlled city of Homs. The strike was
as successful as hoped, in terms of doing minimal damage. The missiles have
a light payload – roughly 220 pounds of HBX, the military’s modern
version of TNT. The airfield’s gasoline storage tanks, a primary target,
were pulverized, the senior adviser said, triggering a huge fire and
clouds of smoke that interfered with the guidance system of following
missiles. As many as 24 missiles missed their targets and only a few of
the Tomahawks actually penetrated into hangars, destroying nine Syrian
aircraft, many fewer than claimed by the Trump administration. I was
told that none of the nine was operational: such damaged aircraft are
what the Air Force calls hangar queens. "They were sacrificial lambs,"
the senior adviser said. Most of the important personnel and operational
fighter planes had been flown to nearby bases hours before the raid
began. The two runways and parking places for aircraft, which had also
been targeted, were repaired and back in operation within eight hours or
so. All in all, it was little more than an expensive fireworks
display.

"It was a totally Trump show from beginning to end," the senior
adviser said. "A few of the president’s senior national security advisers
viewed the mission as a minimized bad presidential decision, and one that
they had an obligation to carry out. But I don’t think our national security
people are going to allow themselves to be hustled into a bad decision
again. If Trump had gone for option three, there might have been some
immediate resignations."

After the meeting, with the Tomahawks on
their way, Trump spoke to the nation from Mar-a-Lago, and accused Assad of
using nerve gas to choke out "the lives of helpless men, women and children.
It was a slow and brutal death for so many ... No child of God should ever
suffer such horror." The next few days were his most successful as
president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does
in times of war. Trump, who had campaigned as someone who advocated making
peace with Assad, was bombing Syria 11 weeks after taking office, and
was hailed for doing so by Republicans, Democrats and the media alike.
One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word
"beautiful" to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at
sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: "I think Donald Trump became
president of the United States." A review of the top 100 American
newspapers showed that 39 of them published editorials supporting the
bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times, Washington Post
and Wall Street Journal.

Five days later, the Trump administration
gathered the national media for a background briefing on the Syrian
operation that was conducted by a senior White House official who was not to
be identified. The gist of the briefing was that Russia’s heated and
persistent denial of any sarin use in the Khan Sheikhoun bombing was a lie
because President Trump had said sarin had been used. That assertion, which
was not challenged or disputed by any of the reporters present, became the
basis for a series of further criticisms:

- The continued lying
by the Trump administration about Syria’s use of sarin led to widespread
belief in the American media and public that Russia had chosen to be
involved in a corrupt disinformation and cover-up campaign on the part of
Syria.

- Russia’s military forces had been co-located with Syria’s
at the Shayrat airfield (as they are throughout Syria), raising the
possibility that Russia had advance notice of Syria’s determination to use
sarin at Khan Sheikhoun and did nothing to stop it.

- Syria’s
use of sarin and Russia’s defense of that use strongly suggested that Syria
withheld stocks of the nerve agent from the UN disarmament team that spent
much of 2014 inspecting and removing all declared chemical warfare agents
from 12 Syrian chemical weapons depots, pursuant to the agreement worked out
by the Obama administration and Russia after Syria’s alleged, but still
unproven, use of sarin the year before against a rebel redoubt in a suburb
of Damascus.

The briefer, to his credit, was careful to use the words
"think," "suggest" and "believe" at least 10 times during the 30-minute
event. But he also said that his briefing was based on data that had been
declassified by "our colleagues in the intelligence community." What the
briefer did not say, and may not have known, was that much of the
classified information in the community made the point that Syria had
not used sarin in the April 4 bombing attack.

The mainstream press
responded the way the White House had hoped it would: Stories attacking
Russia’s alleged cover-up of Syria’s sarin use dominated the news and many
media outlets ignored the briefer’s myriad caveats. There was a sense of
renewed Cold War. The New York Times, for example – America’s leading
newspaper – put the following headline on its account: "White House Accuses
Russia of Cover-Up in Syria Chemical Attack." The Times’ account did note a
Russian denial, but what was described by the briefer as "declassified
information" suddenly became a "declassified intelligence report." Yet there
was no formal intelligence report stating that Syria had used sarin, merely
a "summary based on declassified information about the attacks," as the
briefer referred to it.

The crisis slid into the background by the end of
April, as Russia, Syria and the United States remained focused on
annihilating ISIS and the militias of al-Qaida. Some of those who had worked
through the crisis, however, were left with lingering concerns. "The
Salafists and jihadists got everything they wanted out of their hyped-up
Syrian nerve gas ploy," the senior adviser to the U.S. intelligence
community told me, referring to the flare up of tensions between Syria,
Russia and America. "The issue is, what if there’s another false flag sarin
attack credited to hated Syria? Trump has upped the ante and painted himself
into a corner with his decision to bomb. And do not think these guys are
not planning the next faked attack. Trump will have no choice but to
bomb again, and harder. He’s incapable of saying he made a
mistake."

The White House did not answer specific questions about the
bombing of Khan Sheikhoun and the airport of Shayrat. These questions were
send via e-mail to the White House on June 15 and never
answered.

{inset} Seymour M. Hersh exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam
1968. He uncovered the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and many other
stories about war and politics {end inset}

(3) Avigdor Lieberman:
Israel intel a source of the claim that Assad used chemical weapons against
rebels

Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Defense, retired Marine
General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, during a recent trip to Israel, commented on
the issue of Syria’s retention and use of chemical weapons in violation of
its obligations to dispose of the totality of its declared chemical weapons
capability in accordance with the provisions of both the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC) and relevant U.N. Security Council
resolutions.

"There can be no doubt," Secretary Mattis said during a
April 21, 2017 joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Minister
of Defense Avigdor Lieberman, "in the international community’s mind that
Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its agreement and its
statement that it had removed them all." To the contrary, Mattis noted,
"I can say authoritatively they have retained some."

Lieberman joined
Mattis in his assessment, noting that Israel had "100 percent information
that [the] Assad regime used chemical weapons against [Syrian]
rebels."

Both Mattis and Lieberman seemed to be channeling assessments
offered to reporters two days prior, on April 19, 2017, by anonymous Israeli
defense officials that the April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack on the
Syrian village of Khan Shaykhun was ordered by Syrian military
commanders, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s personal knowledge,
and that Syria retained a stock of "between one and three tons" of
chemical weapons.

The Israeli intelligence followed on the heels of
an April 13, 2017 speech given by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who told an
audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that, once
information had come in about a chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, the CIA
had been able to "develop several hypothesis around that, and then to begin
to develop fact patterns which either supported or suggested that the
hypothesis wasn’t right." The CIA, Pompeo said, was "in relatively short
order able to deliver to [President Trump] a high-confidence assessment
that, in fact, it was the Syrian regime that had launched chemical
strikes against its own people in [Khan Shaykhun.]"

The speed in
which this assessment was made is of some concern. Both Director Pompeo,
during his CSIS remarks, and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, during
comments to the press on April 6, 2017, note that President Trump turned to
the intelligence community early on in the crisis to understand better "the
circumstances of the attack and who was responsible." McMaster indicated
that the U.S. Intelligence Community, working with allied partners, was able
to determine with "a very high degree of confidence" where the attack
originated.

Both McMaster and Pompeo spoke of the importance of open
source imagery in confirming that a chemical attack had taken place, along
with evidence collected from the victims themselves – presumably blood
samples – that confirmed the type of agent that was used in the attack.
This initial assessment drove the decision to use military force –
McMaster goes on to discuss a series of National Security Council
meetings where military options were discussed and decided upon; the
discussion about the intelligence underpinning the decision to strike
Syria was over.

The danger of this rush toward an intelligence
decision by Director Pompeo and National Security Advisor McMaster is that
once the President and his top national security advisors have endorsed an
intelligence-based conclusion, and authorized military action based upon
that conclusion, it becomes virtually impossible for that conclusion to
change. Intelligence assessments from that point forward will embrace
facts that sustain this conclusion, and reject those that don’t; it is
the definition of politicized intelligence, even if those involved
disagree.

A similar "no doubt" moment had occurred nearly 15 years ago
when, in August 2002, Vice President Cheney delivered a speech before the
Veterans of Foreign Wars. "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction," Cheney declared. "There is no doubt he is
amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against
us." The message Cheney was sending to the Intelligence Community was
clear: Saddam Hussein had WMD; there was no need to answer that question
anymore.

The CIA vehemently denies that either Vice President Cheney
or anyone at the White House put pressure on its analysts to alter their
assessments. This may very well be true, but if it is, then the record of
certainty – and arrogance – that existed in the mindset of senior
intelligence managers and analysts only further erodes public confidence in
the assessments produced by the CIA, especially when, as is the case with
Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction – the agency was found so lacking.
Stuart Cohen, a veteran CIA intelligence analyst who served as the
acting Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw the
production of the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that
was used to make case for Iraq possessing WMD that was used to justify
war.

According to Mr. Cohen, he had four National Intelligence Officers
with "over 100 years’ collective work experience on weapons of mass
destruction issues" backed up by hundreds of analysts with "thousands of
man-years invested in studying these issues."

On the basis of this
commitment of talent alone, Mr. Cohen assessed that "no reasonable person
could have viewed the totality of the information that the Intelligence
Community had at its disposal … and reached any conclusion or alternative
views that were profoundly different from those that we reached," namely
that – judged with high confidence – "Iraq had chemical and biological
weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of the 150 kilometer limit
imposed by the UN Security Council."

Two facts emerge from this
expression of intellectual hubris. First, the U.S. Intelligence Community
was, in fact, wrong in its estimate on Iraq’s WMD capability, throwing into
question the standards used to assign "high confidence" ratings to official
assessments. Second, the "reasonable person" standard cited by Cohen must be
reassessed, perhaps based upon a benchmark derived from a history of
analytical accuracy rather than time spent behind a desk.

The major
lesson learned here, however, is that the U.S. Intelligence Community, and
in particular the CIA, more often than not hides behind self-generated
platitudes ("high confidence", "reasonable person") to disguise a process of
intelligence analysis that has long ago been subordinated to domestic
politics.

It is important to point out the fact that Israel, too, was
wrong about Iraq’s WMD. According to Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli
Intelligence Officer, Israeli intelligence seriously overplayed the threat
posed by Iraqi WMD in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, including a 2002
briefing to NATO provided by Efraim Halevy, who at the time headed the
Israeli Mossad, or intelligence service, that Israel had "clear indications"
that Iraq had reconstituted its WMD programs after U.N. weapons
inspectors left Iraq in 1998.

The Israeli intelligence assessments on
Iraq, Mr. Brom concluded, were most likely colored by political
considerations, such as the desire for regime change in Iraq. In this light,
neither the presence of Avigdor Leiberman, nor the anonymous background
briefings provided by Israel about Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities,
should be used to provide any credence to Secretary Mattis’s embrace of the
"no doubt" standard when it comes to Syria’s alleged possession of chemical
weapons.

The intelligence data that has been used to back up the
allegations of Syrian chemical weapons use has been far from conclusive.
Allusions to intercepted Syrian communications have been offered as "proof",
but the Iraq experience – in particular former Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s unfortunate experience before the U.N. Security Council – show how
easily such intelligence can be misunderstood and
misused.

Inconsistencies in the publicly available imagery which the
White House (and CIA) have so heavily relied upon have raised legitimate
questions about the veracity of any conclusions drawn from these sources
(and begs the question as to where the CIA’s own Open Source Intelligence
Center was in this episode.) The blood samples used to back up claims of the
presence of nerve agent among the victims was collected void of any
verifiable chain of custody, making their sourcing impossible to verify,
and as such invalidates any conclusions based upon their analysis.

In
the end, the conclusions CIA Director Pompeo provided to the President was
driven by a fundamental rethinking of the CIA’s analysts when it came to
Syria and chemical weapons that took place in 2014. Initial CIA assessments
in the aftermath of the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons seemed to
support the Syrian government’s stance that it had declared the totality of
its holding of chemical weapons, and had turned everything over to the OPCW
for disposal. However, in 2014, OPCW inspectors had detected traces of Sarin
and VX nerve agent precursors at sites where the Syrians had indicated no
chemical weapons activity had taken place; other samples showed the presence
of weaponized Sarin nerve agent.

The Syrian explanation that the
samples detected were caused by cross-contamination brought on by the
emergency evacuation of chemical precursors and equipment used to handle
chemical weapons necessitated by the ongoing Civil War was not accepted by
the inspectors, and this doubt made its way into the minds of the CIA
analysts, who closely followed the work of the OPCW inspectors in
Syria.

One would think that the CIA would operate using the adage of
"once bitten, twice shy" when assessing inspector-driven doubt; U.N.
inspectors in Iraq, driven by a combination of the positive sampling
combined with unverifiable Iraqi explanations, created an atmosphere of
doubt about the veracity of Iraqi declarations that all chemical weapons
had been destroyed. The CIA embraced the U.N. inspectors’ conclusions,
and discounted the Iraqi version of events; as it turned out, Iraq was
telling the truth.

While the jury is still out about whether or not
Syria is, like Iraq, telling the truth, or whether the suspicions of
inspectors are well founded, one thing is clear: a reasonable person would
do well to withhold final judgment until all the facts are in. (Note: The
U.S. proclivity for endorsing the findings of U.N. inspectors appears not to
include the Khan Shaykhun attack; while both Syria and Russia have asked
the OPCW to conduct a thorough investigation of the April 4, 2017
incident, the OPCW has been blocked from doing so by the United States
and its allies.)

CIA Director Pompeo’s job is not to make policy –
the intelligence his agency provides simply informs policy. It is not known
if the U.S. Intelligence Community will be producing a formal National
Intelligence Estimate addressing the Syrian chemical weapons issue, although
the fact that the United States has undertaken military action under the
premise that these weapons exist more than underscores the need for such a
document, especially in light of repeated threats made by the Trump
administration that follow-on strikes might be necessary.

Making
policy is, however, the job of Secretary of Defense Mattis. At the end of
the day, Secretary of Defense Mattis will need to make his own mind up as to
the veracity of any intelligence used to justify military action. Mattis’s
new job requires that he does more than simply advise the President on
military options; he needs to ensure that the employment of these options is
justified by the facts.

In the case of Syria, the "no doubt" standard
Mattis has employed does not meet the "reasonable man" standard. Given the
consequences that are attached to his every word, Secretary Mattis would be
well advised not to commit to a "no doubt" standard until there is,
literally, no doubt.

In
the latest season of the Netflix drama House of Cards, the fictional
administration of President Francis Underwood and Vice President Claire
Underwood, facing a domestic political crisis, uses a manufactured
chemical weapons attack in Syria to declare war on the country.

In a
case of politics following art, the Trump administration has accused the
Syrian government of "preparing" to use chemical weapons against the
civilian population. No evidence has been presented to back up the concocted
threat.

On Monday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer declared that the US had
"identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack
by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of
civilians, including innocent children." If Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad "conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons,"
the statement continued, "he and his military will pay a heavy
price."

Washington’s ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, added Tuesday,
"The goal is at this point not just to send Assad a message, but to send
Russia and Iran a message… That if this happens again, we are putting you on
notice." In other words, any alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria
could be used to justify war against Iran and Russia.

Pressed to
substantiate the White House’s allegation, Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis
refused to produce any evidence. He said the alleged intelligence was from
"the past day or two" and regarded "specific aircraft in a specific hangar,
both of which we know to be associated with chemical weapons use." This was
a reference to the Shayrat airfield, which the US targeted with a cruise
missile strike on April 6.

Some military officials said they had "no
idea" what the White House was referring to. British defense officials said
they had not seen the evidence, but would support US military escalation
regardless—meaning they do not care whether the allegations are true or
false.

The White House statement followed by just one day the publication
of a detailed article in Die Welt by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Seymour Hersh, the reporter who exposed the My Lai massacre during the
Vietnam War, which demonstrated that the allegations used by the Trump
administration to justify the April 6 missile attack on Syria were
entirely unsubstantiated.

Drawing on background interviews with
military and intelligence personnel, Hersh wrote that the administration
possessed no evidence to back up its claims that the Syrian government had
launched a sarin gas attack on April 4.

The false allegations of a
chemical attack and subsequent bombardment of the Syrian airbase were so
brazen that they provoked opposition from within sections of the
military/intelligence apparatus. "None of this makes any sense," Hersh cited
one officer as saying. "We KNOW that there was no chemical
attack..."

At the time, Trump was under immense pressure from the
Democratic Party and intelligence agencies to shift to a more aggressive
stance against the Syrian government. Just days before, the Senate
Intelligence Committee had held a hearing at which it was alleged that Trump
had effectively collaborated with Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 US
election. Columnists and pundits painted the president as little more
than an agent of the Kremlin.

But that all changed—at least for a few
days—after the attack. As Hersh put it, "The next few days were his most
successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as
it always does in times of war... One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams
of MSNBC, used the word ‘beautiful’ to describe the images of the Tomahawks
being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: ‘I think Donald
Trump became president of the United States.’ A review of the top 100
American newspapers showed that 39 of them published editorials
supporting the bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times,
Washington Post and Wall Street Journal."

At the time, no major US
news publication even raised the question of whether the White House’s
allegations were credible. They were simply accepted as good coin,
demonstrating that the media’s role as a propaganda organ for war had not
abated.

Indeed, Hersh was unable to find a news source to publish his
most recent article in the United States. The story was also rejected by the
UK’s London Review of Books, which published earlier investigative
reports by Hersh, forcing him to turn to the German newspaper.

As
shown by the latest fabricated Syrian "atrocity"—this time, supposedly in
"preparation"—nothing has changed in regard to the media’s readiness to
serve as a sounding board for government propaganda.

But the media’s
acceptance of the administration’s concocted claims about weapons of mass
destruction in Syria cannot hide the fact that they are, in fact, concocted.
In what has become standard operating procedure, the administration has not
attempted to present a shred of evidence, making only the most general
allegations, which the American population is expected to swallow
whole.

Fourteen years ago, the Bush administration used lies about
weapons of mass destruction to start a war in Iraq that led to the deaths of
millions. Now the Trump administration, with the full support of the
media and the entire political establishment, is using equally
groundless claims to escalate a war that could result in a nuclear
exchange between the United States and Russia, the world’s second
biggest nuclear power.

Far from opposing the escalation of war, the
Democratic Party has made this its central demand since the election of
Trump and the focus of its opposition to his administration. In an article
published this month in Foreign A ffairs, Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s
running mate, spelled out the aggressive foreign policy aims that
underpinned Clinton’s candidacy and are at the center of the present
hysterical campaign over Trump’s alleged "collusion" with Russian President
Putin.

Kaine pilloried the Obama administration’s foreign policy,
declaring that Obama’s "unwillingness to forcefully intervene early in the
Syrian civil war will come to haunt the United States in the future." He
excoriated Obama’s "lackadaisical response to Russia’s cyberattacks and
its unprecedented interference in the 2016 election," concluding, "The
United States must always send a clear message to those who mean
Americans harm: don’t mess with us."

As a recent article in the
Washington Post makes clear, the Obama administration had expected to
transfer power to a Clinton White House that would immediately begin
preparing a major escalation in Syria, entailing a possible clash with
Russia. Trump’s surprise election victory disrupted these plans, which were
well advanced. Hence the ferocity of the efforts by the Democrats and the
intelligence agencies to pressure Trump to carry out a shift to a more
aggressive and more anti-Russian foreign policy—efforts that appear to be
succeeding.

The deepening tensions between the US and Russia over Syria
pose an existential danger to humanity. The only way to avert the
catastrophe to which the US political establishment is rushing is for the
working class to intervene independently, on the basis of its own socialist,
internationalist and revolutionary program.

Socialist Worker and Socialist Alternative, the two main groups of
Trots on campuses and in demonstrations, have blacked out the Hersh report.
They are allies of George Soros and possibly funded by him. https://www.socialistalternative.org/
says nothing about Hersh. https://socialistworker.org/ has not
reported the Hersh refutation; but it backed the Syrian uprising. A 2015
article titled 'Smearing the Syrian uprising' attacked Hersh:

"...
Seymour Hersh's widely discredited attempt to claim the Assad regime did not
launch a chemical attack on rebel-held Damascus suburbs in August
2013"

Michael Karadjis challenges the distortions and
faulty reasoning behind the assertion that the U.S. helped enable the rise
of ISIS, in an article written for his blog. June 10, 2015 [...]

The
other article mentioned (The Red Line and the Rat Line) is Seymour Hersh's
widely discredited attempt to claim the Assad regime did not launch a
chemical attack on rebel-held Damascus suburbs in August 2013 and that
instead the rebels, supplied by Turkey, gassed their own children to death.
Hersh's entire story relies on the alleged testimony of an unnamed source in
the U.S. intelligence community. What it says on this "rat-line" issue
likely has about the same amount of credibility. The significant addition to
the above New York Times stories is Hersh's assertion that "the CIA, with
the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi's arsenals
into Syria." Hersh is the only source that makes such a claim; but he is
unable to verify it for us because the whole alleged agreement is in a
secret annex to a Senate Intelligence Committee report that only a few
people have ever seen. It is therefore difficult to know what to make of any
of this.

Russia,
China block bid by Western powers to impose UN sanctions on
Syria

Published time: 28 Feb, 2017 16:58 Edited time: 28 Feb, 2017
19:02

Russia and China have vetoed a UN Security Council proposal that
would have banned the supply of helicopters to the Syrian government, and
blacklisted eleven Syrian military commanders over allegations of toxic
gas attacks.

The proposed resolution, put forward by Britain, France
and the United States, was put to the vote of the international body on
Tuesday despite an earlier pledge by Russia to use its power the quash the
proposal, the seventh time it has done so since the conflict first erupted
in Syria since 2011.

The nations behind the proposal criticized
Russia and China for the veto. [...]

The Trump administration
accused Russia and China of "outrageous and indefensible" action Tuesday
after they vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have imposed
new sanctions on Syria for using chemical weapons against its own
citizens.

In a sharply worded speech after the vote, U.S. Ambassador
Nikki Haley said the message the council was sending to the world was that
"if you are allies with Russia and China, they will cover the backs of their
friends who use chemical weapons to kill their own people." [...]

The
United States sponsored the resolution, along with Britain and France. It
followed the October conclusion of a joint investigation by the United
Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that
the Syrian government had dropped munitions containing chlorine on at least
three occasions in 2014 and 2015.

The OPCW concluded after the alleged
attacks that they had taken place, but it had no mandate to assess
responsibility. That led the Security Council, with Russian and Chinese
backing, to establish the joint investigation to identify the
perpetrators.

In a report issued in October, investigators concluded that
the Syrian government had dropped chlorine-filled munitions on the three
dates in question. The investigation also concluded that the Islamic State
had used mustard gas on at least one occasion.

The Tuesday resolution
called for travel and economic sanctions against several Syrian air force
and intelligence officers linked to the attacks by investigators, along with
asset freezes of several Syrian companies and government-linked
organizations. It also established a mechanism to monitor
compliance.

A single veto from one of the 15-nation council’s five
permanent members — Russia, China, the United States, Britain and France —
can kill a resolution. Bolivia, one of 10 nonpermanent, rotating members,
also voted against Tuesday’s measure.

In denouncing the resolution,
Safronkov suggested that evidence was uncorroborated and came from
"suspicious eyewitness accounts . . . armed opponents, sympathetic
[nongovernmental organizations], media and also the so-called Friends of
Syria."

The latter is an international group, made up largely of U.S.
allies, set up in 2012 in response to Russian and Chinese vetoes of previous
U.N. resolutions on -Syria. [...]

About Me

'Mission statement'.
I am convinced that jewish individuals and groups have an enormous influence on the world. The MSM are, for almost all people, the only source of information, and these are largely controlled by jewish people.
So there is a huge under-reporting on jewish influence in the world.
I see it as my mission to try to close this gap. To quote Henry Ford: "Corral the 50 wealthiest jews and there will be no wars." `(Thomas Friedman wrote the same in Haaretz, about the war against Iraq! See yellow marked area, blog 573)
If that is true, my mission must be very beneficial to humanity.